Muta Akagu II

2

nsibiri.blogspot.com

22

07

2015

In the first version of this guide I introduced the akagu writing system, here I’ll go into more detail about the rules of writing and some of the punctuation marks. Akagu acts mostly like any alphabet, it is written from left to right and the characters follow one another apart from when there is a vowel blend in Igbo. These blends in Igbo happen when adjacent words end and begin with vowels which need to be partially or fully assimilated by the other, usually the preceding vowel is assimilated. This was explained in the first guide. The assimilated sound is either represented as a ‘superscript’ character (like ‘ ’) or as one of the number of ligatures given as examples in the table (like ‘ ’ ), these ligatures are vertical joints between two characters/sounds that are blended in Igbo, not just vowels, for example ‘h’ and ‘ny’ (‘ ’) is often blended in Igbo. ‘n’ nà ‘nn’ Moving on to the functions of the characters themselves, there is a difference between the ‘n’ [‘n’] used to initiate words like in ‘nà’ ‘nà’ and the drawn out sound of the ‘n’ [nn] in words such as ‘nna’, the latter longer ‘n’ [nn] is differentiated from [‘n’] by the fact that it is tonal and can carry tone marks (such as ‘ń’), so ‘nna’, ‘father’ would be written ‘ńà’ as opposed to mimicking Latin script as ‘nna’. The same is for ‘m’ and ‘mm’,where ‘mm’ is the tonal, longer ‘m’. This also applies to words in Latin ownu (Igbo orthography) that is currently written by Igbo speakers with a single n or m but are meant to represent long sounds like ńtụ́ ‘nail’ which would be written in akagu as ‘ńtü’. The important thing is to study what each of the functions of the akagu characters are as they are often different to the Latin alphabet that we are accustomed to. Punctuation Punctuation in akagu is mostly similar to punctuation in Latin which is more universal in that other writing systems share the punctuation. Questions are marked with ‘?’ singal quotation

marks are marked with semi open brackets such as that used here already to show the question mark ‘?’. Full stops are small circles such as . commas are standard short slanted strokes like , and quotation marks are marked as small crosses from the nsibiri icons for speech such as “nánà”. Further punctuation marks such as tildes, colons and dashees can be used as they are in standard Latin, but would be scaled to fit the size of akagu as well as not to confuse them with either nsibiri or akagu. For instance the forward and back slash ‘//\//òtúâ///\/’ are larger than in the Latin alphabet. Parentheses are written as (ǹkïtị). Sounds The sounds for each of the akagu characters are written as IPA symbols in the table on the first page. The sounds do not change under any circumstances so caution should be taken when writing foreign words in akagu not to follow the foreign languages grammatical rules to take the lead, e.g. in akagu ‘Sample’ should not be written ‘SAMPLE’ rather ‘SAM;PỤL;’ note the use of the standard akagu with the ‘serifs’ (like ‘U‘) used to write foreign words rather than the quick hand nsibidi (like ‘u‘) used for writing Igbo words, also notice the use of the diacritic on the ‘Ụ’. this makes the sound between the /p/ and /l/ without copying the English orthography. The marks ‘;’ (a small man) between the akagu characters, you may have noticed, are minor optional punctuation marks to separate foreign syllable structures such as consonant blends that do not exist in Igbo (and maybe for acronyms as well). For example in ‘pr’ in ‘press’ would be written ‘P;R’ so that the words are more obviously foreign and do not come off as spelling errors, it also gives those who are not used to foreign languages help in ‘Igboising’ the words to be easier to pronounce. The difference with this spelling and the spelling used for ‘sample’ is that the ‘pr’ sound is very far away from Igbo so there’s no ‘clearer’ way of approximating /pr/ in akagu to get a similar sound, so it’s just left with the spelling to leave the reader to make their own

approximaiton and for them to see what was being written, unlike with the /pl/ sound which could be approximated with ‘PỤL’. The names of the characters themselves are their sounds plus /a/ or /i/, e.g P is /pa/. Akagu as affixes Akagu is used with nsibidi characters and these characters are mostly verb roots and in Igbo verb roots are often given prefixes (and suffixes) to form new words and to give connotation. For example ‘mỤ’ is the verb for ‘give birth to’, and ‘ümų’ means ‘children’, the prefix ‘ü’ was added. Igbo speakers use a lot of these prefixes without realising it and they serve as invaluable tools for expanding the Igbo language. The affixes coupled with the semantic clarification that the nsibiri characters add (as in differentiating the meaning of each similar sounding word from the type of nsibidi used) is one of the single most powerful aspects of this writing system. In order to keep the lid at 1400 nsibiri characters without further extending to more characters, the idea of the prefix has been extended to add completely new sounds to different nsibiri characters themselves depending on the affix used, but with a meaning disseminated by the original meaning of the nsibiri character. For example ‘ ’ (‘ázų’) means ‘fish’ while ‘ ’ sounded as ‘émî’ means ‘whale’, the prefix in this specific case modifies the character ‘ ’ sound as ‘mî’. This sort of affixes will develop over time, for specific character combinations for specific words, the combinations also included multiple nsibidi characters, some examples have already been added to the Ikpo Nsibidi. Order of writing Apart from writing from left to right (or up and down if need be) there isn’t a particular calligraphic style or stroke order to writing the characters themselves, on practice it usually helps to start the strokes from the top left.